


Offerings

by callmeonetrack



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 13:09:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9273203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmeonetrack/pseuds/callmeonetrack
Summary: Gaeta gets some mysterious presents following the events ofCollaborators.





	

He hardly notices at first.

But two days after his delightful experience in the portside airlock, Felix Gaeta has to count his socks twice. Yes, there's 13 instead of the usual 12 neatly rolled balls in his footlocker, the extra wedged between the straight rows. He assumes its a laundry mixup and plucks them out, unrolling them and looking for initials or other identifying marks, but finds none. Felix frowns and debates bringing them back to the quartermaster for approximately 15 seconds, before dropping them and shutting the footlocker with a bang. Socks are in short supply and he's not feeling especially charitable these days anyway.

A few days after that he grabs his shower kit only to find his old dull razor replaced by a sharp new one. Its plastic handle is pink, and Felix wonders for a half second if this might be some kind of primitive hazing ritual, a dig at his sexual preferences. It's never been a secret, but the military has always retained a streak of closed-mindedness about certain things, and Felix hasn't gone out of his way to make his personal appetites public knowledge. After a moment, he looks around, half-expecting childish taunts to ensue, but his few rackmates that are awake seem to be entirely uncurious about his discovery, simply going about their own morning preparations. He pauses for a few more seconds, then grabs the razor, an old half-formed Gemenon saying suddenly drifting through his mind. Something about counting the teeth on a gift horse, but that's not exactly right, and it occupies his brain all the way to the head, the provenance of the object forgotten entirely. 

The unexpected gifts continue—soap, protein bars, other small notions easily overlooked. Dee starts teasing him that he has a secret admirer, and he wonders fleetingly if that Pegasus CO, Hoshi, could be the one behind the presents. He’d traded a few glances with the man in the CIC yesterday as they were changing shifts, and there’s definitely something interesting there. For the first time since before they settled on that frakking hellhole of a planet, Felix had felt something besides numb acceptance.

But it isn’t until he pulls back his curtain to find a small red notebook on his pillow that Felix finally and fully takes notice. He sinks down on his rack, thoroughly confused, and reaches for the item, flipping through its blank pages. Since childhood, when he would spend hours creating blueprints of the restaurants he dreamed of building one day, Felix had always kept a small notebook on him to capture ideas and possibilities. The notebook, like so many other things, had been lost on New Caprica, but lately Felix had felt the tug, small flashes of inspiration and just yesterday he’d been lamenting the loss of his book to Dee in the mess. Lamenting quietly, of course. He had zero interest in getting into a pissing contest about sacrifices on that damned planet, and Starbuck had been sitting at the table right behind…

His jaw actually drops slightly as Felix considers the possibility. He remembers seeing her in the head last week, right before that extra bar of soap popped up in his shower kit, and just a few days ago he’d passed her in the hallway—silently, their gazes averted—right outside this bunkroom. He flips slowly through the empty pages, his surprised mind still half occupied, when he gets to the end of the book. On the last page, in the bottom corner, there’s a delicately etched line drawing, almost transparent it’s so light, of a flower.

Felix has always been a man of science more than religion, but he recognizes the shape from the processionals that used to wind past his childhood home on the way to a nearby temple. He would stare in awe at the large parade floats festooned with masses of these brightly colored crocuses. They called it the Penitent’s Rose, and believers would offer them up to the gods during the spring equinox, in hopes of being symbolically purged of sin. Felix had always associated the flower with that time of year, the budding green leaves of new beginnings.

The drawing is small and unsigned, barely more than a doodle, but painstakingly shaded, rendered in far too much detail to be accidental. Felix stares at it for a few moments in silence and then settles back with it, into his rack, leaning back against the pillow and half-closing his curtain. He picks up a pencil and turns to a fresh page.


End file.
